Dimitris Glezos » Weblog » FOSS, linux /weblog A greek/geek weblog Wed, 25 Apr 2012 19:16:23 +0000 en hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.3.2 The narcotic known as ‘open source’ /weblog/2009/08/22/the-narcotic-known-as-open-source /weblog/2009/08/22/the-narcotic-known-as-open-source#comments Sat, 22 Aug 2009 00:30:58 +0000 Δημήτρης Γλέζος /weblog/2009/08/22/the-narcotic-known-as-open-source “Open-source: A stimulant of the central nervous system, tolerance reuptake inhibitor, reliance suppressant and cargo-cult inhibitor. Because of the way it strongly affects the left-brain pathways responsible for the feelings of independence, autonomy, self-determination and confidence, open-source can be highly addictive. Also referred with the street name ‘realization fix’, its long-term use can cause culture-shocks that other models still exist.”

red-pill-or-blue-pill
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hgtk visual diffs /weblog/2009/08/10/hgtk-visual-diffs /weblog/2009/08/10/hgtk-visual-diffs#comments Mon, 10 Aug 2009 18:56:54 +0000 Δημήτρης Γλέζος /weblog/?p=1483 I noticed that from a point in tortoisehg’s history, extdiff was broken on default installs. It just kept popping up “No visual tool has been configured”. This happened even if one defined ‘meld’ or ‘/usr/bin/meld‘ in hgtk userconfig. Today I got in the mood to debug this. After some hacking and hg bisects I found the answer. Where? In the hgtk manual (“use the manual, Luke!”).

You’ll need to edit your ~/.hgrc by hand and add the following in it:

[extdiff]
cmd.meld = meld
opts.meld =

Now, the ‘meld’ option will be available in hgtk’s userconfig tool and will be used for visual diff operations.

hgtk-extdiff
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Shutter awesomeness /weblog/2009/08/04/shutter-awesomeness /weblog/2009/08/04/shutter-awesomeness#comments Tue, 04 Aug 2009 11:42:26 +0000 Δημήτρης Γλέζος /weblog/2009/08/04/shutter-awesomeness Shutter is a feature-rich screenshot program for Linux.” — These guys really mean what they’re saying. This program is simply fantastic.

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Photos from Greek Coding Camp /weblog/2009/07/15/photos-from-greek-coding-camp /weblog/2009/07/15/photos-from-greek-coding-camp#comments Wed, 15 Jul 2009 14:12:41 +0000 Δημήτρης Γλέζος /weblog/2009/07/15/photos-from-greek-coding-camp
With GCC/2009 now completed, my photostream has been uploaded at /photos/events/gcc2009/.

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OpenOffice and Latex equation syntax /weblog/2009/07/15/openoffice-and-latex-equation-syntax /weblog/2009/07/15/openoffice-and-latex-equation-syntax#comments Wed, 15 Jul 2009 13:08:27 +0000 Δημήτρης Γλέζος /weblog/2009/07/15/openoffice-and-latex-equation-syntax On Fedora: sudo yum -y install openoffice.org-ooolatex. Plain. Effectiveness.

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GCC/09: init /weblog/2009/07/04/gcc09-init /weblog/2009/07/04/gcc09-init#comments Sat, 04 Jul 2009 14:38:32 +0000 Δημήτρης Γλέζος /weblog/?p=1446 Here I am, at Crete, participating in the first ever Greek Coding Camp.

We’re at Paleochora, a small town in South Crete. At the moment we’re 10 people, and today a few more are coming along. We’re sitting at the camping’s cafe/restaurant, under mulberry trees and the loud sound of with birds and insects hacking on open source.

We arrived here in the morning after a good trip with the boat from Piraeus. Good thing we caught the bus which came directly from Patras, entered the boat and dropped us in the city center of Chania. We went to the village home of alup, eaten a rich breakfast from his parents which included the local specialty of Bougatsa. Yummy!

Four guys together with camping equipment managed entered the tiny car of local guru hoo2 and traveled to Paleochora. The day started with the usual laughter overdose with the local group.

The teams formed into projects which can last a few days. For today, we have the following projects:

  • Translation of 45+ standard Open Office Templates
  • Creation of Greek-specific OOo Templates (eg. υπεύθυνη δήλωση)
  • Openoffice Testing Greek Build
  • Transifex workflow support for translations. Development taking place on our bitbucket ‘reviews’ branch.
  • Bugfix in Xorg for letter ‘ς’

Lunch included a local specialty, τσιγαριαστό αρνί (special lamb in casserole with olive oil and herbs) and, of course, a healthy dose of Tsikoudia. Afternoon session was on quite soon.

Follow our work on Twitter at the #gcc09 hashtag!

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LinuxTag ’09 /weblog/2009/06/28/linuxtag-09 /weblog/2009/06/28/linuxtag-09#comments Sat, 27 Jun 2009 23:54:18 +0000 Δημήτρης Γλέζος /weblog/?p=1438 Here I am, at Berlin, at LinuxTag and FUDCon Berlin ’09.

Quite a few things exactly like last year: Berlin is beautiful, East Berlin is fantastic. Weather is great, food is good and I’m having a blast. LinuxTag still tries to balance between a hacker conference and a trade show, admittedly not very well.

A few things different this year. Michael Jackson died. We’ve got FUDCon this year organized in a way to overlap with LinuxTag. Talk about strong Fedora presence! Everywhere I go I see people with blue polo shirts, it’s simply rocking wild. This gave the chance to more folks from the US to fly here and join our partae which is great.

Once again, I created a ‘Faces’ album with portraits from the event by invading people’s privacy.

/photos/events/linuxtag-09/

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Busy, happy June /weblog/2009/06/24/busy-happy-june /weblog/2009/06/24/busy-happy-june#comments Tue, 23 Jun 2009 23:33:13 +0000 Δημήτρης Γλέζος /weblog/?p=1430 Log of past couple of weeks or so:

  • Had the opportunity to present our work with Transifex at a press conference of the Greek Open Source Company (also known as EELLAK), being broadcasted live and showcasing some big FOSS projects led by Greek teams and companies. Besides talking about our recent progress and requests from our customers, I had the chance to meet some hacker friends who build enterprise and government-level solutions, also utilizing Amazon Web Services for complex tasks. I love discussions between folks using completely different technologies who try to find patterns between them to improve their own work. Fantastic.

    After the press conference I stayed a bit longer and discussed with the EELLAK board their community architecture, communicating how popular and successful communities abroad operate. Our focus with EELLAK is to be a catalyst and accelerator for the Greek Community, supporting its operations and motivating for more work and results. The presence of such an entity behind communities, even so loosely-coupled as a country-wide one has proved to be a great accelerator factor in a lot of cases.

  • The annual Venture Capital Forum took place in Athens last week, and we took the opportunity to identify possible partners that could share the vision we have at Indifex and bring value to our team. I had the chance to meet some very interesting people, including representatives from a few VCs who were interested in exploring the possibility to invest in Indifex.

    The general feeling at the conference from most entrepreneurs (and established startups) was that the VC land in Greece is quite risk-averse (read: techophobics?). There are quite a few technology companies with leading, disrupting technologies in Greece, however very, very few big Greek investors are willing at this point to take this adventurous and exciting path. Which makes sense if one doesn’t like the excitement and adrenaline of changing the world and competing with software giants.

    But really, I’m positive there are people out there who want to put their money in revolutionary companies with global audiences.

  • The annual Greek Open Source Developers’ Conference took place in Athens last week. Unfortunately I wasn’t able to attend and present Lotte (greek) but John was there and presented how Indifex is adopting Open Source to help its customers solve their localization and content management needs. Really, I can’t imagine how we could have achieved half of our goals if we weren’t walking the open source road.

Finally, I was able to wrap-up things for a week and travel to Berlin for LinuxTag and FUDCon. I’m feeling very excited to meet again with good friends and new people.

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Big-picture release translation status /weblog/2009/06/06/big-picture-release-stats /weblog/2009/06/06/big-picture-release-stats#comments Sat, 06 Jun 2009 11:04:37 +0000 Δημήτρης Γλέζος /weblog/?p=1352 A lot of things are happening lately in Transifex-land. We’ve been working hard in bringing transifex.net live, developing Lotte, the Lightweight Online Translation Editor, recruiting two more developers for Indifex, opening up a new office and stuff.

Been experimenting with new things too. One of them was various mockups to improve the way we present information to release engineers who need an overview of how a release looks like from a localization perspective. Take the XFCE default branch πpage, for example. It gives a good overview of the release, and I was wondering if we could make it even more rich by breaking up the statistics in the ones comprising the total percentage.

I’ve been playing around with a mockup for this. This came up in Inkscape:

Big-picture release statistics

What do you think? Does it make sense? Is it useful?

Update: I neglected to mention that the numbers and colors are random, but the idea is that they are completion percentages and red = low ones, green = high ones.

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On criticism /weblog/2009/06/01/on-critisism /weblog/2009/06/01/on-critisism#comments Mon, 01 Jun 2009 13:45:28 +0000 Δημήτρης Γλέζος /weblog/?p=1346 Great project leaders not only accept criticism, they encourage it. They understand that their project’s worst enemy is stagnation, which comes from apathy, oppression, and not enough feedback.

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Fedora Weekly Webcomic EOL’ed /weblog/2009/05/23/fedora-weekly-webcomic-eoled /weblog/2009/05/23/fedora-weekly-webcomic-eoled#comments Fri, 22 May 2009 23:26:13 +0000 Δημήτρης Γλέζος /weblog/2009/05/23/fedora-weekly-webcomic-eoled Oh dear. The awesome Fedora Webcomic is being EOL’ed. I’ll miss the Greek Ubuntu team complaining to me: “Aren’t there any other distros to make fun of?” =)

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FOSDEM ’09 photos /weblog/2009/05/13/fosdem-09-photos /weblog/2009/05/13/fosdem-09-photos#comments Wed, 13 May 2009 17:59:44 +0000 Δημήτρης Γλέζος /weblog/?p=1258 Better late than never! Here are my photos from FOSDEM 2009.

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